This invention relates to a vehicle locator system for displaying the position of motor vehicles such as police cars operating within a given geographic area. More particularly, the invention relates to a positional display system for indicating the position of a plurality of vehicles such as police cars on a map overlay together with the location of the occurrence of an incident warranting police attention so as to aid a dispatcher in making command and control decisions and the like.
The prior art contains many different types of vehicle location systems nearly all of which are extremely complex and expensive. Many of the systems of the prior art employ a plurality of fixed wayside stations located about the geographical area of concern which aid in automatically determining the position of a vehicle operating within the area. Such systems are quite complex and expensive and require positioning and maintaining the wayside stations thereby greatly increasing the cost and decreasing the reliability of the systems.
The present invention avoids the disadvantages of the prior art and provides a relatively inexpensive, highly reliable display system adaptable for use in large or small applications, to cover either large or small geographic areas, and for use with either a large or a small number of motor vehicles.